Read this recent interview with Roni Feldman - This work is composed of crowds of people interacting with water: drinking, cheering, a Degas bather, refugees from Hurricane Katrina, being purified in the Ganges, and others. It becomes a whirl of human experience. I apply the blurred, ethereal nature of airbrushed acrylic to paint multitudinous human features. As the ethereal figures blend into each other, I form tensions between individual and crowd, abstraction and representation. In my paintings, whirls of figures celebrate, mourn, protest, consume, dance, and embrace alongside others that drown, burn, and dissolve. My crowds evoke the power and ecstasy of unified intention alongside a potential descent into mob mentality. The compositions recall the idealistic pursuit of 1960's psychedelia, van murals, and other airbrush art forms, but in my work, airbrushed paint is like a thin veil that separates utopia and dystopia, civilization and chaos, agony and ecstasy.
